The wild competition for the audience’s attention demands a new posture from companies and brands. More than offering a solution, product, or service of quality, it is necessary to work towards amazing the public.
The task starts with creating content experiences and should extend to, for instance, actions that provide immersive experiences.
As the name suggests, those measures allow the consumer to have a new perspective of something they may already know.
For example, a company that produces juices could promote a tasting of its products, but this wouldn’t exactly be new.
Why not take this test to another level? How about presenting scents that refer to the flavors of your drinks?
This is just one example of what an immersive experience can be. To understand all that is behind this very important concept, we have prepared this article.
Keep on reading and find out how to amaze and retain your audience!
What is an immersive experience?
Before going deeper into the options and strategies that we can explore within this concept, it is important to understand it.
The immersive experience represents any brand action aiming to create a new, illusory environment for its audience.
The goal is to make the participant feel part of what is being presented to them, pushing them to explore it with their sense.
At a time when the user experience has become increasingly important, coming up with new ways to communicate with the audience is essential.
Besides assuring the quality of your company’s portfolio, it is necessary to attract, captivate, and conquer the audience. The good news is that there are many ways to explore the immersive experience in your strategy.
Through digital transformation, it is much easier to improve the experience offered to your consumer.
Check out some options in the next section!
Virtual Reality (VR)
With the use of specific glasses, the user immerses themselves in a different reality. Audio and video are virtual and can take the participant anywhere.
Given the possibilities of VR, why not present your company’s factory with a virtual tour, for example? The possibilities are endless when you have such technology at your fingertips!
Augmented Reality (AR)
Another very interesting option is augmented reality, which can create a different visual experience within a real environment. Imagine being able to paint the walls of your room with the most varied colors without using a drop of paint?
Through this technology, a smartphone camera can simulate each wall’s colors, improving even more customer experience.
Projection
What if you could use the facade of a building in the middle of a city to display something unique for your consumers?
Even though it’s not exactly new technology, projections are widely used as complements to create immersive experiences.
When audio is also explored, the experience can be even more attractive and exclusive for users.
Mixed Reality
If you’re thinking that virtual reality and augmented reality are two great immersive experiences that would be even better together, then you’re already on board with the concept of mixed reality.
Mixed reality (MR) is similar to AR in many ways. For instance, you can take advantage of it without having to buy expensive specialized equipment first.
However, it also adds elements of VR to the experience, as well, to bring an audience the best of both worlds.
Time Magazine’s Time Immersive interactive news app is an excellent example of a well-done MR immersive experience in action.
It leverages the best of both AR and VR to bring its customers a fun, beautiful new way to consume news stories, historical events, and more.
How does the immersive experience work?
A good immersive experience should take the user to a place they haven’t been before.
The idea is to take them out of their comfort zone by offering something uncommon. Often, through technology, it is possible to create something unique to impact the audience.
The immersive experience will give the participant a different perspective of your brand.
Your company is an “experience provider” more than a product or service. And when this is well done, the experiences can help build long-lasting bonds with your audience.
Why Immersive Experiences Are So Important for Your Business
Immersive experiences are about more than keeping your brand on trend in all the right ways. They also come attached to multiple advantages for businesses of all types. Here are a few to keep in mind.
An immersive experience can give you a competitive advantage.
Regardless of a brand’s niche or industry, its marketing needs to help that brand stay ahead of its competition.
Being quick to embrace the latest technology is one way to do this, especially when it comes to capturing the hearts of coveted youth demographics.
An immersive experience makes your brand easier to relate to.
Again, it’s not enough to simply offer a great product or service to capture your customers’ hearts. They want to feel personally connected to your company and to what you stand for.
Well-executed immersive experiences are incredible ways to do this while ensuring people remember you.
Immersive experiences help global brands overcome language barriers.
If you already manage a global brand (or hope to one day), you don’t need to be told what obstacles language barriers can be.
Going immersive with your marketing gives you an easy, effective way to get through to consumers who may not speak your native language and show them why your brand is worth their time.
How to use immersive experiences in your marketing strategy?
After all, how can an immersive experience be applied to marketing? Known as experiential marketing, this strategy can be very useful to strengthen the presence of your brand.
Check out how!
Events
Immersive experiences are also widely used in face-to-face events. The idea is to conquer the user by offering something that cannot be found in your competition.
Instead of just promoting a tasting of your product, why not show how it got to the consumer’s hands?
Sharing part of that story with virtual reality can be a great action.
Benefits presentation
Have you ever wondered if you could present the benefits of your solutions differently? Augmented reality can be an example of this.
With the smartphone camera, the user can visualize an empty apartment floor plan with the decoration furniture sold by a store, for example.
This would allow the potential customer to simulate arrangements and get a sense of how the furniture placement would look.
10 Examples of Immersive Experiences
In practice, what have companies around the world done in terms of immersive experiences?
We have listed some memorable examples to serve as an inspiration for you!
1. Samsung and Six Flags
The Six Flags amusement park network is one of the most popular in the United States. Known for its roller coasters, the company decided to innovate and offer a unique experience to its visitors: to mix the real world with a virtual one.
In partnership with Samsung, they offered visitors special glasses for a very unusual experience in one of their rides.
While doing the usual roller coaster ride, the virtual reality goggles added playful elements to the route, such as dragons, spaceships, and meteors.
So, besides worrying about the ups and downs of the ride, the participants felt the urge to dodge the elements that appeared on their screens.
2. NBA
Aiming to reduce the impact of fans’ absence in its arenas, the NBA has created an immersive experience to bring basketball fans to the matches.
Instead of just watching the games at home, those interested could sign up on the professional basketball league website in the United States to appear in real-time at the official courts.
Using a Microsoft Teams feature, fans could take part a little more in the matches, creating an experience unlike anything else.
Even the traditional chants to decentralize the opponents were synchronized by the virtual fans.
This example shows that sometimes all you need is a few tools to create a unique experience.
3. Old Irish
Beer is an important part of the Irish cultural heritage. It is an element that is part of the country’s tradition, making Irish pubs, for example, a very distinctive feature of their culture.
Therefore, the idea of the Old Irish brewery was to present its product slightly differently to its potential public in the Czech Republic.
Offering a virtual reality experience, the brand displayed the features of classic Irish scenarios through goggles until the participant came across a traditional pub.
However, the twist was the return to reality: the pub really was there, with a real scenario set around the person and even the same actors are shown in the virtual content!
4. Anitta
This example doesn’t exactly concern a company, but the Brazilian singer Anitta, who also has her brand.
In July 2020, she decided to explore the benefits of an immersive experience to present her new clip.
On the streets of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, unreleased scenes from the recording of her song Tócame were displayed on selected buildings’ facades.
Simply, the singer managed to innovate and create a new environment for her audience to get to know her newest production.
5. Natura
An event like Rock in Rio is, by itself, a unique experience for the participants. But Natura went even further and created “the Spaceship”.
In one of the arenas at the Olympic Park in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian cosmetics and beauty products company created a unique and exclusive environment for those at the event.
The idea was to provide a different view of our world.
6. Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet is no stranger to creating beautiful, engaging travel content that makes you want to see the world. But it can understandably be difficult to accurately convey the experience of visiting a place to members of a remote audience.
However, the travel brand’s “Exploring Canada in 360” campaign managed to accomplish this perfectly.
It partnered with Samsung to create a series of gorgeous 360-degree videos that treated viewers to a beautiful, immersive experience that didn’t require additional equipment they might not have on hand.
This made it more accessible to more people and, as a result, more successful.
7. Vital Farms
Today’s consumers are looking for more than just great products that represent a great value, especially when it comes to the foods they eat and feed to their families.
They also want products that are sustainably produced and ecologically responsible.
Vital Farms recently responded to this expectation and tapped into the power of immersive experiences by using 360-degree video to show people where their eggs come from.
Consumers walked away from the experience with a better idea of what terms like “cage-free” and “pasture-raised” really mean. They also had a much better idea of why they should get their eggs from Vital.
8. Patron Tequila
This beautifully-made video from Patron Tequila is yet another perfect example of how interactive video can be leveraged to bring a product to life for a target audience.
It invited the audience to fly along with a bumblebee as it witnessed the company’s tequila-making process in action.
Patron’s audience got to enjoy a charming, colorful immersive experience while they learned something interesting.
Meanwhile, Patron successfully set itself apart from the competition by showing precisely what its customers get for their money when they make Patron their tequila of choice.
9. Domino’s
If there’s one thing Domino’s really got right about marketing, it’s the ability to use social trends to make sure its target audience understands what its mission is all about — getting hot, delicious, ready pizza into people’s hands as quickly as possible!
A recent marketing campaign allowed Snapchat users to use the app’s augmented reality feature to play with various fun effects, including a lens that showed them how they’d look in AR glasses that reflected pizzas.
Naturally, they were also able to use Snapchat’s shopping feature to place an order with Domino’s, which they eagerly did.
10. Adidas
Outdoor enthusiasts, amateur athletes, and active people everywhere have role models they look up to just as surely as anyone else does.
From time to time, some even like to entertain the idea of partaking in their favorite pastimes right alongside those role models.
Sportswear giant Adidas gave their customers the chance to do exactly that a few years ago with their Delicatessen VR campaign.
Existing and potential customers got the opportunity to use VR to climb literal mountains right alongside their favorite professional climbing legends.
To do that, the company united technology, art, music, and our senses.
Wrap Up for Immersive Experiences
From the beginning of the experience, the sounds, touches, and projections created a different environment for the spectators. The idea was to propose a new and unexpected feeling for each one of them.
At times, a stronger wind would enter the space and, along with it, the aroma of flowers. With this strategy, Natura relied on human sensibility.
Digital presence no longer means just having a well-managed page on social media channels.
Nowadays, brands need to do more to differentiate themselves. One way to do this is to provide immersive and unique experiences for your customers.
Although the examples in this article require a large budget, there are other ways to achieve a closer relationship with your audience.
How about going deeper into another example of a strategy that can be very helpful in offering more to your public?
Check out another article and find out how to create tailored experiences for your audience through content personalization!
